Being 'real' is big business these days. But is there anything undisputedly real, undeniably authentic? Or are these just subjective words, big words, we like to throw around? The real, the genuine, the authentic is often defined as proven to be original, not derivative of, not fake, etc. But language is fickle. For instance, talking about authentic Mexican food just signifies it was made in the traditional way with the traditional recipe. Shift this interpretation to art, however, and you get something else. An authentic Rembrandt is not just such a painting made in the traditional way with traditional paintbrushes. In fact, the word authentic is actually added here to denote the inverse, to indicate that this is not a copy made under the right circumstances, but the original.
Sometimes the original can feel like the copy. For many young kids growing up, the history of pop music for instance, extends itself backwards from the present. We get into Gang of Four thanks to Bloc Party, or listen to Crosby, Stills & Nash as a shadow cast by Fleet Foxes. For us, Editors was simply a rip-off of Interpol, not of late 70s post-punk. For us, Madonna's American Pie was the original and Don McLean was the copy and, for us, Ray Charles' I Got a Woman was a curious precursor to Kanye West.
In this way, too, a carbon copy for us young kids is first and foremost a way to allow some third party to eavesdrop on our e-mail conversations. It is of course named after the thin carbon papers that we used to attach to our paper in order to write out an 'original' and a 'copy' at the same time. However, when this process was first invented, by Ralph Wedgwood in 1806, the process was inverse. The sturdy, normal paper would be at the bottom, and a piece of tissue paper would be above it and you would write on that. Despite the fact that you were writing, physically speaking, more directly on the tissue paper than the regular one, the former would remain the 'copy' and the latter the 'original'. The copy might be more 'real' here.
When is a song real and authentic? Most would point to the original version by the original recording artist, though this often includes artists who did not even write the song themselves. It could be argued that they at least laid the first blueprint, but most of these songs would have to be at least hummed or played in a stripped version to the original recording artist in order for them to further interpret from there. We no longer live in an age that allows for the mathematical abstraction of sheet music. Everything is but a chain of human interaction, an omnipresent butterfly effect.
Finally, what is the real thing in an intangle, electronic world? Which version of the e-book is the most real? There is no rough manuscript, no notes chalked up in the margins. If the modern writer starts out on the computer and ends on the computer, he leaves no artifacts behind. It is a democracy of origin, each version as authentic and inauthentic as the next.
A Certified Copy
All of this and more is what Copie Conforme, the 2010 movie by director Abbas Kiarostami, concerns itself with. It is almost too clever for its own good. It stars an English writer who writes a book, in English, about a theory of the real and the fake, a book called Certified Copy. The idea comes to him as he walks around in Italy. He brings it back to England, writes it and releases it. It doesn't stir up much in its homeland but it does get translated to Italian and for some reason it is a huge success there. So he returns to Tuscany, to the place where it all began, to talk about it – in English. Now where do we go to locate the 'real', the original of the book: England or Italy? Hard to tell, both could raise valid arguments.
The writer, in his theories, points out that even the undeniable real thing, say Michelangelo's David, is just a copy of the real original, the model it was inspired on. On this note Umberto Eco, in his essay Travels in Hyperreality, provides many humorous examples. The one that springs to mind is the museum somewhere in California who had crafted a copy of the Venus de Milo, except with arms, claiming that they did research after the original Venus model, and lo and behold, she had arms. The museum thereupon claimed this sculpture to be even more real (!) than the one in the Loeuvre. Even more real than the real (and if you've ever wondered why realer sounds weird while taller sounds fine, that is because real should not be quantative; the fact that we often talk about more real now is a sign that the word is changing in meaning).
The other protagonist of Copie Conforme, a woman desperately clinging to a husband that is long gone and was forever absent, is intrigued by this theory. She meets the writer and they go to walk around some beautiful Tuscan village, exchanging views. In a curious turn of events, a roleplaying game starts: the woman takes the writer for her husband, and he plays along. Just some innocent fun, you might think, until the writer starts referring to past events he cannot possibly know about, and both of them obstinately refuse to break character while so many reasons pass by to do so. Are they still the same characters as at the start? Or are we being pointed out that they, in fact, are fallible, that is to say fake, because they are actors? The writer's godlike omnipotence, knowing things he cannot know, is a clear breaking of the fourth wall. It is an acknowledgement that he is not really, in fact, the fictional writer he is playing.
All that was once directly lived…
Actors can do that because, even though we all take part in a wilful suspension of disbelief, we, ultimately, know they are actors. It is no secret. What is more clandestine is that most public figures similarly function as actors. Guy Debord gives an excellent example in his prescient 1967 text Society of the Spectacle:
Kennedy the orator survived himself, so to speak, and even delivered his own funeral oration, in the sense that Theodore Sorenson still wrote speeches for Kennedy's successor in the very style that had done so much to create the dead man's persona.
Debord's brilliant theory of the spectacle can be easily moulded to fit our subject: not just athletic events, tv shows and theatre productions are spectacle, the whole world is. Replace the word spectacle by movie and you might just see what Shakespeare was on about when he said that all the world's a stage.
We could speculate for ages about this, but it seems the kind of subject that only gets more confusing as you expound, as you try to figure it out. Perhaps we should follow the advice in the original title of the book the writer presents in the film: Forget the original, just get a good copy.
